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THE PRINCESS DIARIST
By Carrie Fisher

After it was announced last year that Carrie Fisher was going to publish the diaries she kept while playing Princess Leia during the filming of “Star Wars” in 1976, some corners of the fandom blogosphere went full-tilt tizzy in anticipation. Fisher, after all, had already proved herself as an entertaining scribe with four novels, a one-woman Broadway show, her Twitter feed and two previous memoirs recounting her family history, career, addictions and mental-health issues.

“The Princess Diarist” is her latest memoir. One wonders, though, after 40 years of the “Star Wars” franchise — with its seven films (Fisher in four of them so far), countless documentaries, talk-show appearances, conventions and the internet’s obsessive cataloging — what’s left to tell? Could there really be any more just-remembered anecdotes, maybe quaffing tequila shooters on set with Darth Vader?

Well, as it turns out, Carrie Fisher does have some new information to share with her fans. But as they say online, if you’d rather find out yourself: SPOILER ALERT!

Her big reveal? She and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had a secret love affair during the shoot, or as she refers to it, “a very long one-night stand.” She hasn’t talked about it publicly until now and states that it’s only her side of the story, but tells it two ways: from her current viewpoint as a 60-year-old looking back and as a 19-year-old writing in her journal as it happened. (Whether anybody cares about the dalliance four decades later is debatable, but it does give a new perspective on their characters’ relationship in the sequels.)

The titular diaries take up about 70 pages of the book. If you’ve ever been a teenage girl with a paper-based diary (or sneaked into that teenage girl’s room to read that diary), the contents will be familiar: Deep thoughts about love, life and happiness, occasional rants, wobbly attempts at poetry and little spurts of personal insight are all splattered across the pages. It may not be great writing, but it’s an empathy tractor beam

Many entries show Fisher trying to process her feelings over the affair. Some even display a degree of self-awareness about her early writing efforts, which she describes as “adolescent jargon peppered with random selections from a fairly gaudy vocabulary.” Still, it feels invasive to be reading the material, even with her permission.

The present-day reflections wrapped around either side of the diary section are livelier and echo the style of her previous memoirs. Long riffs on her extremely devoted fans — she says she’s “moved by them” — are mixed in with slicing observations on Hollywood dysfunction and sexism (yes, a certain gold bikini comes up). One chapter recalls the creation of Princess Leia’s infamous dual-bun hairstyle and makeup choices: “And who wears that much lip gloss into battle? Me, or Leia, of course.”

In trying to establish separation from this movie character that’s been fused to her for two-thirds of her existence, Fisher offers a thoughtful, sardonic meditation on the price of fame, cost-of-living adjustments included. “Perpetual celebrity — the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture — is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali,” she writes.

“The Princess Diarist” may not be the jolly trip down memory lane some fans are looking for. But like her 19-year-old self, Carrie Fisher doesn’t hold back on how she feels about life inside the “Star Wars” industrial complex — and that’s ultimately more interesting than another story about filming the Death Star trash-compactor scene.